Abstract

In today’s world, document management plays an increasingly important role. However, there is currently no solution to manage complex documents in an integrated manner. Typically, existing approaches provide only limited document management capabilities and do not offer comprehensive access, manipulation and retrieval functionalities for all document elements. In this paper, we present conceptual and architectural foundations of Pylonix, a database module tailored for integrated collaborative document management. A novel data model capable of representing complex documents including all their elements is outlined. We propose a software architecture which allows the module to be integrated into applications requiring fine-grained document management and offers database and data model independence by using an intermediate language. Finally, we present functionalities, capabilities and advantages of Pylonix in comparison with existing work.